And built up a ton as well. The trendy thing's been buying up old fashion brands and doing a bunch of product and marketing work - Canada Goose jackets being a thing that everyone and their mom has to wear is a good example of that.
That situation is a bit different, because it was a private company that was acquired and then IPOed, which brought in a large amount of new capital.
Whereas Twitter was the opposite: it was already publicly traded and then went private. So there was no new capital. Instead, we see a ton of cutbacks.
They IPOd in 2017, where as Bain (IIRC) started that marketing+product thing a bunch of years earlier. Out of nowhere everyone on any big budget movie production was wearing a jacket with a canada goose logo.
The point is that the IPO was the payoff in the end that made the investment worth it.
Musk is not infusing capital, he's cut-cut-cutting to the bone. What's the endgame? At what point does Twitter become more valuable than the day he bought it at $44 billion?
I consciously avoid any product that comes from a private equity owned company because I assume it will be the cheapest crap they will be able to get on the shelf without it actually falling apart before you get it out the door. To be fair, fashion products which are ephemeral by nature might actually be a good fit for that. But as someone who's been on the receiving end of a private equity buyout, I want no part of that ever again.
